


All the Useless Things -- Origins

by tin_girl



Series: All The Useless Things [5]
Category: Original Work
Genre: All the Tea, Multi, Toxic Relationships, a gross overuse of purple prose, and bird metaphors, the backstories at last
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 05:13:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29005101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: “You are a tabula rasa, Bird. Blank and for me to write upon.”
Series: All The Useless Things [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1790320
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	All the Useless Things -- Origins

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, here's the part with the backstories of the month characters. Most chapters will be from December's pov, but probably not all of them. This one is, though. Uh, it will have.... some number of chapters I can't predict. I'm going to prioritise the main story with the kids and update this only once in a while but, ideally, the end of this part will align with the end of part... ummm, whatever number the part about the kids' fifth year will be. A disclaimer: I should have reread parts of the story before writing this but uni :''') so there might be some inconsistencies *cough* orratherglaringplotholes *cough* 
> 
> A warning specifically for this chapter: a mention of a secondary character's suicide

Caspar Netscher, _Boy with a Birdcage_

*

Ask a God to name his weaknesses.

If he is honest, it will not make him sour.

~Nikita Gill, _Even the Gods_

*

She doesn’t have a story of her birth to embellish and tell someone in exchange for a bit of bread crust. No, all she has is this:

She starts – like a conjuring, like a finger-snap, like a magic trick that’s not really a trick but the real thing – when He finds her in the nook behind her favourite skip bin.

“Why, you look like a chicken bone,” he says, giving her an appraising look, towering over her with his teenage wisdom and height, hands in pockets. He looks wolfish where she’s just a mouse: like he, too, has been going hungry, but as though, unlike her, he’s learning hunting in order to survive.

“Chicken,” she whispers to herself, drool pooling in her mouth.

“Aren’t you cold?” he asks with a grin, even though he already knows. Doesn’t he know? It’s the cold time of the long time, and garlands have been hanging in the nicer neighbourhoods for a few weeks now.

“Yes,” she says, nodding her head. “Yes, _cold_.”

“You—” he starts, frowning at her. “You look just like this painting.”

“Must be some painting,” she snorts.

“How old are you?”

“Don’t know.”

“What’s your name?”

“Don’t know.”

Don’t know, don’t remember, won’t tell – it’s all the same.

He smiles when she backs into the wall, and glances at the tips of her holey shoes. “No, don’t worry,” he says, voice like silk, only what would she know about silk? “We’ll find you one.”

What he does next is not a magic trick, but if it was one, it’d be her favourite: he spreads his coat open in an inviting gesture until she snuggles up against him and then closes it around her like a blanket, only what would she know about blankets?

*

So that’s how it starts: her with memories she lets go of as soon as he promises her better ones, staring at him in wonder as he rolls up the sleeves of the jumper he gave her so they won’t trail over her fingers. The place he lives in is one of those abandoned buildings faraway, so grey and shabby-looking that the blown-out windows aren’t even its worst feature. Outside, it starts raining, and she will remember this: how he got her under a roof before she could get drenched.

He gives her food – crackers, stale bread, soft fruit gone brown – and she gobbles it down until he wrestles it out of her hands.

“You have to chew first,” he reprimands, keeping the food out of the reach of her clawing hands and dividing it into small bites. She doesn’t dare kick him and allows it when he says ‘open’ and puts morsels on her tongue, teaching her patience one bite at a time.

“My fingers are cold,” she complains later because, in a way, it’s a marvellous thing: he has her wrapped in moth-eaten layers and the cold in her extremities stands out only because it’s the first time in forever that she’s not cold all over.

“Are they, now,” he mumbles, grabbing her hand by the wrist and pinching the tips of her fingers warm one by one.

“Will you brush my hair?” she whispers sleepily later, trying to remember if she’s eight or nine years old, wondering if it’d make him happy if she succeeded.

“I ought to cut it all off,” he sighs. “There’s no way you don’t have lice.”

“Lies?” she mumbles, confused. “I’m not a liar, I swear.”

“No, you’re not, are you?” he laughs, wrapping her hair around his fingers. “I suppose it’d be a shame.”

“Will you tell me a story?”

He snorts. “No.”

“ _Please_.”

“All right, then. Listen carefully. Once upon a time…. Once upon a time…. Once upon a time….”

And then she falls asleep.

*

What she learns about herself is this: she doesn’t trust easily.

What she learns about herself is this: she trusts him instantly.

There’s no reason she should, she knows that much, but there it is all the same. She’s just a kid, but he’s still just a kid himself, and when she refuses to part with her shirt and wear the one he gets for her, he patiently mends the holes and lets her keep it.

At first, they’re alone, a kingdom of two, he an exiled prince, she a little fool that might just be special enough for him to keep, rats for subjects, the world for an enemy. There are off-limits rooms in their ruin of a castle, spaces where, if she jumped up, she could fall two floors down, and spaces where he stores things that aren’t for her eyes or hands.

“Your socks are too big,” he tells her their third day together, tapping the skin of her calf. “You should have rubber traces up here.”

One of the socks has a hole on the heel, too, and he hooks his finger there to tug it off. They wash with rainwater and bits of stolen soap and he tells her that there are places he could go, places with showers where he’d be welcomed with open arms, but ‘better dirty than a beggar, Bird’.

‘Bird’ is not her name but that’s what he’s calling her until he comes up with a better one. If she had a mirror, she’d be tempted to stand in front of it, crane her neck, and inspect her shoulder blades to check if they look like they could ever sprout wings, but there are no mirrors in their kingdom: the only time she sees her reflection is when they’re close enough to spy it in his eyes.

He has many qualities that she doesn’t know what to make of: ambition, greed, pride, vanity. He doesn’t have cutlery but he has shaving cream even though – thirteen, or fourteen? – he doesn’t need it yet.

He doesn’t scare her, but then, she’s not really acquainted with fear. All she’s ever known was cold – cold, colder, freezing cold, lonely cold, too cold, the occasional, long-awaited not-cold.

He doesn’t give her a name to call him by but she decides, in the privacy of her head, that if she’s to be Bird, then he ought to be Nest.

*

The world as she knows it – and she does know it, even after just a handful of days, because he’s a person of habits – ends on a milky morning, breaking like an egg.

She wakes and there are voices, faces, and too many pairs of shoes on too many pairs of feet. Boys, girls, closer to his age than hers, crowding around him as he talks about the art of theft:

“Act like there’s nothing you want, and people won’t expect you to _take_.”

There is a story like this – she almost remembers it. A charming, charismatic thing inciting lost boys to mischief as though the whole world is theirs when it so clearly isn’t.

“Soon, we’ll have enough things to make a home out of any shabby place,” he promises the children, but here’s something she’s smart enough to guess right away by the kids’ clothes: most of them already have homes.

“Not homes,” he corrects when she asks him about it later. “Houses.”

“What’s the difference?”

“House,” he says, a distance of a dozen feet between them. “Home,” he says once he crosses it to pull her close.

In her head, she translates it into something more familiar: a cage, and a nest.

But _they_ don’t call him Nest, no.

 _They_ call him January.

*

“Why should I tell you how I got the name?” he snorts when she pulls on his sleeve and asks days later. “My past is mine and mine alone.”

“What about _my_ past?” she says, suspicious.

“What past?” he laughs, arching an eyebrow like it’s just the silliest thing. “You are a tabula rasa, Bird. Blank and for me to write upon.”

She doesn’t understand but she’s a creature of instinct and knows better than to ask.

*

He teaches the kids the art of theft, but he’s no good at it himself.

“I don’t have the talent for it,” he confesses one evening over a fire. “Nor the willingness.”

“Because stealing is bad?” she asks, purely out of curiosity. She doesn’t much care about good vs. bad – her world is still divided into cold and warm, into hunger and into bearable hunger, into unquenchable and mild thirst.

“Because you have to be stealthy,” he says with a grin. “I’d be too tempted to get caught, just to see the person’s face.”

“All right,” she says, snuggling up close. He doesn’t always like that – hates it most of the time, even – but she doesn’t mind being pushed aside enough not to risk it. “Will you teach me?”

“One day.”

“One day?”

“One day, I’ll teach you all sorts of things, Bird.”

*

He shows her his London in glimpses, postcard-shots for her to arrange into a kaleidoscope of greyness later. She can hardly make any sense of it, since he never uses the same shortcut twice, but she pockets what she does remember like she would stray pieces of paper, to unfold later in the privacy of the mind that is, somehow, blissfully still hers.

So then, his London is newspaper pages fished out of puddles to keep up with the news and then made into hats for her enjoyment, is climbing fire escapes and breaking onto roofs to feel like royalty towering over their land, is standing outside restaurants and inhaling deeply whenever the door opens to whet her appetite for all the delicious things that he swears they’ll enjoy in abundance one day. Rain never catches them when they’re outside, as though the weather, smarter than the passersby rushing past them with briefcases in hands, knows to mind his wishes, but they only ever see the city under a thick blanket of clouds anyway since he despises the sun.

His London is grey but it’s not just the proof of their circumstances. No, his London is grey because he _likes_ it that way.

*

He only teaches her distrust once he’s sure she trusts him, whispering in her ear:

“This one, over there, he’ll save your life if need be, but there better not _be_ need, understand?”

She’s been with him a month when she dares ask:

“Why me and not some other kid hiding behind a bin?”

He blinks at her, surprised.

“I told you that you looked like a painting.”

That doesn’t seem to her a good enough reason to adopt someone. Not just yet.

*

He gives her things he had others steal: a comb, a brush when the comb breaks, tangled in her mess of a hair, dresses, trousers when he learns she likes them better, more dresses when he decides _he_ likes them better, music boxes, toys she’s too old for, puzzles she’s too young for, books she has no use for.

“You can’t read?” he says when he catches her skipping from picture to picture. “Oh, of course you can’t.”

He doesn’t teach her. He doesn’t have the patience. He asks an older girl that stops by sometimes, asks it with his charming smile and his wolfish eyes that contradict it by seeming to say, _do it or else._

“We’ll try getting you to write your name first,” the older girl says, fingers coloured white by the piece of chalk she’s holding up.

“I don’t have one.”

“He calls you Bird.”

“It’s just for now,” she explains. “He’ll find me a better one. He _promised_.”

The older girl glances over her shoulder as if to make sure they’re alone. “Don’t you remember your old name?”

“He says I’m a ta— a tablara?”

“A tabula rasa,” the older girl sighs. “You must have had one, though. A name.”

Trust no one, he said earlier, and maybe this is a test: maybe her loyalty is being questioned and maybe later January will know what she said and explain it by reminding her that walls have ears.

So she doesn’t give it up. Doesn’t reveal what she maybe remembers, maybe doesn’t.

“Let’s write your name instead,” she suggests. “What’s _your_ name?”

“He calls me Whistle,” the older girl says with a frown. “I used to be—”

She’s fast and places a hand over Whistle’s mouth before she can tell her the name.

“Better not,” she warns in a whisper, and the whisper makes her wonder if she herself deserves January’s trust.

“I like being a tabula rasa,” she tells Whistle later. “Blank is like clean, isn’t it? Blank is like snow.”

“Blank is like a page,” Whistle says, weirdly reluctant. “What matters is who has the pen.”

Eager to make Whistle happy, she recites the alphabet best she knows how:

A, B, C, E, G, F, H, K, L, S M I L E N O W, P L E A S E.

By the time Whistle is in the news, she can read.

“Couldn’t find a knife, slit her wrists with scissors,” January explains, since he doesn’t believe in coddling. “Her stepfather was doing horrible things to her.”

“What about us? Weren’t we good enough?”

“Apparently not,” he says with a bitter curl to his mouth. This: rejection, wounded pride, is stronger than any sorrow he would have felt otherwise.

“The funeral,” she whispers to him late at night. “We should go.”

“Shut up,” he hisses into the dark.

_Shut up, or else._

*

Over the months, she learns a lot about birds: she learns about murmurations, and about how much nutrition they need, and about migration patterns. She learns about sirens as the Greeks imagined them, she learns to recognise the sounds pigeons make, and she learns the smell of roast beef even if she doesn’t learn its taste. She tells January about her findings as he calls her Bird day after day, but there’s one thing she keeps from him:

Back when they were stuck on Q (“what do you mean, it’s more like ‘k’ than like an ‘o’?”) Whistle told her about ortolans.

“They’re drowned and marinated in Armagnac, roasted, and plucked,” she explained in a hushed voice. “You eat one feet first and you eat it whole, bones, beak, heart, everything. The tradition is to cover one’s face with a cloth so God won’t see.”

“God?” she asked, doubtful. She’d never believed in Santa, and she saw no point in believing in its sterner equivalent.

“They catch them, drown them, and then eat them up,” Whistle said with a wry smile. “For as long as there have been weapons, what happens to birds, little or big, is rarely flight.”

It’s this specific bird fact that she’s thinking of when January comes up with a name for her at last.

“I shall name you December,” he decides with a dazzling smile. Only rich people smile like this: she’s seen it in magazines that she now knows how to read, and it’s jarring on him, the self-appointed princeling of the rejected and the poor.

“After the day you found me?”

“Oh, no.”

“Then why?”

“I shall name you that because January comes after December.”

“I see,” she says, even though she doesn’t, not at all.

*

He has all of her trust but he loses some of her loyalty the first time she sees a painting. It’s a postcard with a copy of the work on it, slid between the pages of one of the books others steal for her at January’s request. It slips out as she turns a page, taking forever to innocently flutter to her feet and settle there blank-side-up. In a small print it says:

Pablo Picasso, _Dora Maar au Chat._

She turns the picture over and somehow, even though she’s not an adult, and even though _her_ nose is in the middle of her face as it should be, she knows that when January said she reminded him of a painting, he meant this one.

 _There’s a whole world besides you_ , she thinks later, staring at the back of his head. _I don’t want it for myself yet,_ _but_ it’s there _._

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! <3


End file.
